Observations of a Global Nomad

Early in 2008, workers at a government-owned textile factory in the Egyptian mill town of El-Mahalla el-Kubra announced that they were going on strike on the first Sunday in April to protest high food prices and low wages. They caught the attention of a group of tech-savvy young people an hour’s drive to the south in the capital city of Cairo, who started a Facebook group to organize protests and strikes on April 6 throughout Egypt in solidarity with the mill workers. To their shock, the page quickly acquired some 70,000 followers.

But what worked so smoothly online proved much more difficult on the street. Police occupied the factory in Mahalla and headed off the strike. The demonstrations there turned violent: Protesters set fire to buildings, and police started shooting, killing at least two people. The solidarity protests around Egypt, meanwhile, fizzled out, in most places blocked by police. The Facebook organizers had never agreed on tactics, whether Egyptians should stay home or fill the streets in protest. People knew they wanted to do something. But no one had a clear idea of what that something was.

The botched April 6 protests, the leaders realized in their aftermath, had been an object lesson in the limits of social networking as a tool of democratic revolution. Facebook could bring together tens of thousands of sympathizers online, but it couldn’t organize them once they logged off. It was a useful communication tool to call people to — well, to what? The April 6 leaders did not know the answer to this question. So they decided to learn from others who did. In the summer of 2009, Mohamed Adel, a 20-year-old blogger and April 6 activist, went to Belgrade, Serbia.

The Serbian capital is home to the Center for Applied NonViolent Action and Strategies, or CANVAS, an organization run by young Serbs who had cut their teeth in the late 1990s student uprising against Slobodan Milosevic. After ousting him, they embarked on the ambitious project of figuring out how to translate their success to other countries. To the world’s autocrats, they are sworn enemies — both Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Belarus’s Aleksandr Lukashenko have condemned them by name. (“They think we are bringing a revolution in our suitcase,” one of CANVAS’s leaders told me.) But to a young generation of democracy activists from Harare to Rangoon to Minsk to Tehran, the young Serbs are heroes. They have worked with democracy advocates from more than 50 countries. They have advised groups of young people on how to take on some of the worst governments in the world — and in Georgia, Ukraine, Syria-occupied Lebanon, the Maldives, and now Egypt, those young people won.

In Belgrade, Adel took a week-long course in the strategies of nonviolent revolution. He learned how to organize people — not on a computer, but in the streets. And most importantly, he learned how to train others. He went back to Egypt and began to teach. The April 6 Youth Movement, along with a similar group called Kefaya, became the most important organizers of the 18-day peaceful uprising that culminated in President Hosni Mubarak’s departure on Feb. 11. “The April 6 Movement and Kifaya are the groups that have led the charge in actually getting protesters organized and onto the streets,” a Feb. 3 report from the geopolitical analysis group Stratfor said. The tactics were straight out of CANVAS’s training curriculum. “I got trained in how to conduct peaceful demonstrations, how to avoid violence, and how to face violence from the security forces … and also how to organize to get people on the streets,” Adel said of his experience with the Serbs, in an interview with Al Jazeera English on Feb. 9. “We were quite amazed they did so much with so little,” Srdja Popovic, one of CANVAS’s leaders, told me.

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—	Revolution U

Revolution U »

Blogged again. I still think this is one of the most inspiring articles I’ve ever read.

In a nutshell it introduces a group of Serbians who were students at the time of the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in Serbia. You probably know that Milosevic was largely responsible for the various ethnic cleansing in the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Pro-Serbian militias in Bosnia and Kosovo slaughtered thousands of Bosniaks and ethnic Albanians.

Not all Serbs were game for this, and some just didn’t like living under a dictator, so through a long process of non-violent protest and movement managed to ride the wave of popular revolt once it sparked to topple the man.

Non-violence is far better than violence in a large number of ways. Most recently the activists in Egypt mostly used non-violence themselves. They occupied Tahrir Square, cleaned up after themselves, returned items from looters, kept themselves fed and orderly, and showed that they were responsible citizens who had a legitimate problem.

Violence provokes reaction. If you are violent against any member of police they’re fully authorized to react with violence back at you, at the very least in self-preservation.

When police come to disperse demonstrations and they face violence all they can do is crack down. When they face normal people keeping calm they’re stuck. They could get orders to break it up, and that would look like unprovoked brutality. Or they would have to deal.

Either way, violence only begets more violence. Violent revolutions are only necessary in such situations where all peaceful options are exhausted. For example, it would be hard to see liberal discussion in Libya.

So for the Occupy Wall Street people… I don’t exactly know what you plan to do. I think this is just a venting of frustration and that you want your voices to be heard by the people already in power. Okay. That’s your right to gather and express.

But don’t provoke the police into clamping down on you. Throwing things at cops and uploading videos of them beating you up doesn’t suggest what you think it does: that it shows The Man and his Fat Cats are sending the Po Po down to snuff out you poor people. It’s just manipulation.

Get your voices heard, but don’t grab media attention by provoking violence yourself. I know American media is horrible in its sensationalism and is only actually interested in violence, but there are other ways. Keep uploading videos of peaceful protest.

It worked in Cairo, at least at first. A few weeks of camping out with songs and cleaning crews and they toppled a dictator.

I guess it’s a little ironic that Americans should take lessons from Arabs in how to protest effectively, but I blame the media. Egypt was watched by international news organizations like Al-Jazeera and the BBC. Al-Jazeera has a soft heart for little people and the BBC has a knack for thorough analysis. I can’t say the same about just about any American news outlet.

So, you know, good luck. Iran’s Green Revolution demonstrators used Twitter. Egypt’s protesters used Facebook. America has no interest in locking down the Internet. Use those to get the word out, but about your peaceful and non-violent concerns.

And read the article.